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User talk:JohnBot
If you add a comment here, I will be notified by email. You might like to add ~~~~ to insert your name and the date. --JohnBot 12:49, 18 August 2007 (UTC) Empty categories added to tip templates See for instance this diff in page Setting the font in the GUI -- Tonymec 04:14, 25 April 2008 (UTC) ---- Thanks for the report, but this is intended. I periodically run JohnBot to make maintenance changes (and I sometimes take the opportunity to tweak things, like fix typos or insert tags). What you reported is from this discussion on the vim-l mailing list. Summary: I am moving the Category:xxx lines into new arguments of the tip template. This is so editors won't be confused by the category lines, particularly at the bottom of the tip when adding a comment. I've noticed such confusion on a few occasions. Anyway, to make it a bit easier on editors, if there are less than two category lines, my bot inserts the blank lines you report. That is intended to make it a bit easier to add a category later. I reasoned that once two such lines are present, an editor could work out how to add a third. I recently updated the category guidelines with information about the new procedure. --JohnBeckett 05:32, 25 April 2008 (UTC) : That whole idea of moving all Category links into the top template seems pretty silly to me anyway. Couldn't we just leave them as Category:Something one under the other somewhere -- if you don't want them at the bottom, then at the top? Is it such an "unlikely assumption" to imagine that many users of this wikia site will already have used the same software, which equips "the" Wikipedia? IMHO a wiki works best if run with a light hand -- as close to anarchy as "reasonably" possible. : However I haven't thought this all the way through. Maybe I'm wrong. -- Tonymec 06:15, 25 April 2008 (UTC) ::I would prefer the "standard" approach you're referring to, but we're not stopping anyone adding standard category lines. It's just that JohnBot will eventually move them into the tip template. ::The reason we're being different is our hope to generate comments on the tip page (not the talk page). As you know, on Wikipedia the standard approach is for the article page to be sacrosanct (content is subject to various policies), and for the talk page to be for "any silly idea you like" chat. After quite a bit of thought, I feel that the Vim Tips wiki should differ from this model. Perhaps when the tips wiki is fully polished (and we're all driving hydrogen-powered flying cars), we can follow the Wikipedian model. But there are too few people working here for us to handle two pages (article + talk) for every tip. I could go on at some length about this because I've seen people make a talk-page comment on a tip, and that comment is something that a reader of the tip would want to see. But I'll rest at this. ::Another point is that what the bot moves into the template, the bot can move out again, so it's not necessarily a policy that will apply forever. That's why I was happy to make a fairly radical change without a great deal of worry. If there had been any significant doubt on the vim-l mailing list I wouldn't have done this. ::I really have seen evidence that editors find the category lines to be quite confusing. I think the more sophisticated editors who know that we're doing something strange would be quite able to adapt. ::--JohnBeckett 09:04, 25 April 2008 (UTC) “Minor manual clean” Hi John, I notice your bot has recently removed the tabs I had painstakingly but intentionally pasted left of the example I put some time ago under Annoyed that some stuff is reset during GUI init?#Comments to keep the commentary and the example more or less in line with each other. I'd like to know what I did wrong and why. --Tonymec 01:52, September 24, 2009 (UTC) :I did quite a few edits at that time ( ). Most were purely automated but I include the "+ minor manual clean" when I look at each file and manually choose whether to tweak it. I generally try to put the wikitext into a somewhat standard format while I have the individual files on my computer. There have been many very useful editors since July 2007, but the "standard format" is what suits me because I'm the most persistent editor, and I'm relying on silence being an indication of consensus (with some discussion on isolated points, such as the category business mentioned earlier on this talk page). So, it was my decision (and manual edits) that put all the scripts in each tip into a fairly consistent shape. I do those edits mostly in a trance and it is entirely possible that I have made a mistake, so thanks for raising it and you are welcome to revert or re-edit as you want. Sometimes I slow down and seriously refactor wording, but edits such as the one you mention are performed on "automatic pilot" without much thought. I notice that I did another re-format of scripts in that session: diff. There is no suggestion that anyone did anything wrong, although as I've mentioned, I might have been too hasty. Please fix it as you please, but bear in mind my (our?) ambition to eventually remove nearly all comments by putting useful info in the tip. Sometimes I will go to quite a bit of trouble to write a nice comment in a tip, but I only do that when I think there is a reasonable chance of at least some of the material being used in a tip somewhere. Tip 663 is very short, so it would be nice to just fix it and remove the review template and all comments. JohnBeckett 02:31, September 24, 2009 (UTC) ::I'll leave it at that for the time being; it may be due to a difference in presentation between my favourite skin (which I hadn't yet lost at the time, see my latest rant on your talk page) and the default. --Tonymec 02:58, September 24, 2009 (UTC)